South East Regional Hospital receives CuddleCot cooling system from young parents through Bears of Hope

Heartbreakingly for doctors Ashleigh Collins and Andrew Jones, their son Robin Ralph was born under these difficult circumstances on July 10, 2023.

However, they are bravely talking about it and recently travelled to South East Regional Hospital in Bega to donate a special device to help families going through the same.

"I was pregnant with our second baby, completely normal pregnancy up until about 38 weeks, so pretty much full term, and I became quite unwell suddenly overnight," Ashleigh said.

Ashleigh had a severe placental abruption before an emergency C-section.

"We learnt a lot in the week after about how to say, I guess, goodbye, and one of those things was the CuddleCot."

The CuddleCot is a cooling system that lies beneath the baby inside a bassinet; it preserves their appearance, and enables families to spend as much time as they wish together with baby, before having to say goodbye.

Containing a thin, soft cooling pad to ensure the baby is fully cushioned, connected to an insulated hose and a whisper-quiet cooling unit, this portable system offers a flexible way to cool baby that is adaptable to the needs of the family.

Andrew said it was not long ago that babies born through still birth were taken away from their parents who had to say goodbye that day, taking away any opportunity for closure and a trauma that can persist even decades later.

"Instead of having a day or two to say goodbye, we had effectively the better part of a week to really do the little normal things you expect with a newborn, being able to give him a bath, and dress him, and spend some time with him, take some photos," Andrew said.

"You're trying to fit a lifetime of memories into a week, and trying to memorise every feature of their face and their body, so you'll remember them always."

Looking with such admiration towards her partner, Ashleigh said gently, "You can live with the sadness because we've been able to show our love for him."

When asked by friends and family on how they could support the couple, they decided to fundraise through Bears of Hope with the goal to raise $6500 for a CuddleCot to donate to a hospital.

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They actually managed to raise $28,000, and now three of these special devices have been donated to the Royal Women's Hospital Randwick, Townsville Hospital in Queensland, and South East Regional Hospital in Bega.

"The biggest difference in our grief and saying goodbye to our son was this," Ashleigh said.

Sonia White, the maternity unit manager at South East Regional Hospital said parents have loved their baby from the moment they fell pregnant, so a device like the CuddleCot gives them "time to develop that relationship outside the uterus verses being inside the uterus".

"I guess the biggest thing [is that] people don't talk about it much," Ms White said.

"One in three women have a miscarriage, so one is three women have lost their baby within 12 weeks, and in that 12 weeks they've built that relationship and often you don't even hear about it.

"They go to work the next day, they pretend nothing's happened, [they're] hurting and it's hard.

"You start that, 'Oh, this what I'm going to do, it's going to go to school, even though it's 10 weeks old, you start growing this future in you, so to have it suddenly stop, it's so difficult."

To donate to the Bears of Hope fundraiser for further CuddleCots, click here

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